This is a story about losing and searching for identity, both at an individual level and a societal/community level. It’s about being lost and tying your hopes to the next great hero, over and over. It’s about trying on new identities, sometimes stolen identities, like a wardrobe, and still not finding yourself. The only certainty through the entire novel is the specter of death that appears from page one.⁣
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We hear the story alternately across two time/place settings: early 1990s Albania and late 1990s/eartly 2000s across Europe and New York City. In the former time, the narrator Bujar and his best friend Agim are desperate to escape their situation in a country at the brink of disaster, stuck in the middle of economic crisis and bordering wars on their ethnic Albanian family. Their relationship grows past friendship, especially as Agim’s own gender and sexuality begin to bloom. In the alternate later years, I was at first uncertain who the narrator was, only knowing that they too are running away from somewhere and something that haunts them.⁣
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This is not a happy book. I learned some history, and it prompted me to read more on Albanian/Kosovar relationship with Yugoslavia/Serbia. The author is Finnish-Kosovar, and I trust his voice as the storyteller. There was a clear message of the weight and depression felt by the Albanian people, whether in their homeland or the diaspora. Through the eyes of the narrator, it’s a defeated (dead?) society stuck in its traditional ways and yet always wanting to be something more. Using Bujar as the microcosm, the author plays out hardship after hardship for a character that can never be happy, and who inflicts great harm around him in his attempts to do so.⁣
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I’m glad I read this book. It gave me a story from a global perspective I hadn’t heard before. I’m honestly still struggling to process it, though.⁣
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